Flesh and Bone of the Damned Chapter 00
by ScarletVioletta
Summary: Ren Tao finds himself madly in love with a young woman who is tied to the darkness.


Flesh and Bone of the Damned

**Flesh and Bone of the Damned**

**A Shaman King Fan fiction**

Prologue

One long-distant summer when nightingales sang through the evenings in the gardens of Baghdad and the air was heavy with the scent of roses, a merchant of that city grew mistrustful of the wife he loved and took a path that led him to darkness. This is his tale:

He was called Abul-Hassan, she Nadilla. He was rich and powerful; she the daughter of an elderly scholar whose dark little house lay huddled in the poor quarter of the city. But when he first saw her in the spring of that year, her beauty wove a spell about him. Soon thereafter, he took Nadilla from her timid parent and made her his wife. The house he brought her to had many rooms and courtyards, but Nadilla seemed to care little for it. She drifted apathetically through the lengthening summer days, staying always in the cool shadows of the house, away from the sun that glared on the white walls outside and flickered among the palm fronds. She ate almost nothing. Lost in some unfathomable reverie, she ignored the servants. Indeed, she appeared hardly to see her husband.

But when daylight faded and the lamps were lighted, Nadilla brightened. The stirring evening breeze seemed to revive her, and she became the wife Abul-Hassan desired, glowing and tender. With playful ease, she enticed him early to bed each night. Abul-Hassan noted the alteration but put his wife's daytime listlessness down to the dust-laden heat. The coming of cool weather would restore her, he felt sure. His sleep each night was deep and dreamless.

A night came, however, when Abul-Hassan awakened suddenly in the dark. His wife was no longer beside him, and there was no sign of her in the room. He lay alert for some moments, but finally the soft patter of palm branches moving outside the window drew him back into the embrace of sleep.

He awakened again only when the liquid wails of the muezzins echoed over the town from minaret to minaret, calling the faithful to dawn prayer. Nadilla had just returned. He watched from under his lashes while she removed cloak and veil and when she slipped into his bed, he lay as though asleep. The next night she disappeared again. The third night he followed her.

Out through the gardens and into the moonlit city she ran lightly, as though to meet a lover, and Abul-Hassan pursued. She made her way down twisting streets and along the now-quiet alleyways of the bazaar, finally halting at the gate of a walled house in the oldest quarter of the town. The gate before her seemed to spring open of its own accord.

Clinging to the shadows for secrecy, Abul-Hassan followed his wife into a courtyard, down a winding stone stair and into a corridor. There he paused, appalled at the sacrilege of entering such a place. The walls were lined with sarcophagi. This was a family tomb. He went on slowly, guided by the faint jingling of the silver bangles Nadilla wore on her ankles and the whisper of her silken trousers. Before long, he came upon an archway. The jingling had stopped, and so he peered around it cautiously.

Beyond lay a stone crypt, faintly lighted by a funerary lamp set in a niche in the wall, and close by the crypt, amid a pathetic jumble of bones and grave offerings, knelt his wife. When Abul-Hassan saw what she was doing, his heart lurched.

Panting and whimpering, Nadilla dragged a body from its coffin. She pulled an arm free. Then with a high-pitched snarl, she bent her head and tore at the gray flesh with sharp little teeth. Abul-Hassan waited to see no more of the horror. He fled to his house. During that long night he lay tormented by bleak and turbulent thoughts. His wife slipped into his bed again at dawn, heavy-eyed and flushed. He said nothing to her, but all through the next day, he watched her narrowly. She was no different from what she had been before – vague, languid, clinging to the shadows and brightening when they lengthened and dusk returned. Abul-Hassan offered her food then. She refused it, but she smiled at him, and when he saw the white teeth flash, he could contain himself no longer.

"Perhaps we should find you dead men's flesh, Wife," he said.

She stiffened. Her eyes began to glitter blindly, and her lips stretched into a mindless grin, cruelly distorting her pretty face. Then, nimble as a cat, she sprang. Abul-Hassan was ready for her. With his curved knife, he stabbed his wife to death. He buried her at once, without ceremony, outside his walls so that his house would not be defiled. If the servants noticed his activities, they made no comment. Abul-Hassan was a stern master, and the strange and silent woman he had brought into the house to be his wife had found no favor with them.

The trials of Abul-Hassan were not ended, however. He discovered this the third night after the killing. As he tossed and turned, staring out the window at the stars that winked between the palm fronds, his wife – or some ghastly simulacrum of his wife – came to him.

She rose near the foot of the bed, from among the carpets and pillows on the floor. Her white shift clung to her in blood-crusted patches were he had stabbed her; one arm hung stiffly at her side; her face was mask-like, the lips loose and the eyes sunken. Whatever animated her was not life. She moved with the jerking awkwardness of a marionette, and a foul, necrotic stench veiled her.

In a grim parody of wifely affection, she climbed onto the bed where Abul-Hassan lay transfixed and crawled leadenly over him, wheezing and mumbling as she moved. The nauseating aura grew stronger, the tortured wheezing louder. She bent her head, and her sharp teeth neared the tendons of his neck.

Nadilla had allied herself to evil during life. She had been human, but barely so – flinching from the day, flourishing in the dark, and growing ever more addicted to human flesh. After death, some nameless force of darkness had claimed her wholly, using her to satisfy its own craving. She had become a vampire, a soulless corpse that drew its sustenance from human blood.


End file.
